ISTOCK, FOUQUE MICHAELLast month (May 24), the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) formally announced that, due to budgetary concerns, it would be discontinuing its small conferences program in 2018.
ASM hosts a number of scientific meetings, including ASM Microbe, which took place last weekend and typically brings together thousands of researchers. The organization also holds medium-size conferences, such as Biothreats and the Clinical Virology Symposium, which gather around 1,000 to 1,500 individuals, and small conferences such as ASM Biofilms and ASM Cell-Cell Communication in Bacteria, with only a few hundred attendees or fewer.
“We’ve been undergoing an overall, society-wide strategic look at our programs,” David Hooper, chair of ASM’s Meeting Board, tells The Scientist. “There were a number of conferences that had, over time, been having reduced attendance and abstract submissions and had been a money-loss problem for the society.”
As a result, he says, ASM will no longer organize small conferences, with the ...
